Spirit sources from the rural South inspired lauded artist

NEWYORK— Indoors, for Allison Janae Hamilton, is always a kind of compromise. She grew up in Florida — first in M iami,attu ned to the ocean and the Everglades, then in Tallahassee, with its exuber- ant tree cover, and where she enjoys kayaking in the haunting cypress swamps. Childhood summers were spent in western Tennessee, returning for planting and picking time on her maternal family’s farm. Her multimedia art never strays far from her concern with the land, especially the Southern land, and its occupants, espe- cially its black occupants.

“Landscape is this incredibly beautiful plane that we gettoliveo n,” she said. “But it’s also a plane that has been wielded by those in power in a very violent way.”

Her work has an unabashed pastoral quality. Yet every rustic setting where she stages her photog- raphy, every clip and sound in her video works, every artifact in her installations — the fencing masks, the tambourines, the bundles of horsehair, the taxidermy alligators — is present for a reason. Her aim is to manifest history: that of her family, the black South, and by this method, the nation.

Hamilton, 34, is based in New York: She arrived in 2006, fresh out of Flor- ida State University (where her father, Leonard Hamilton, is the head basketball coach), and after a stint in fashion, began earning grad- uate degrees. Before receiv- ing her MFA, from Columbia in 2017, she already had a Ph. D. in American Studies from New York University, where she studied with pho- tography scholar Deborah Willis and wrote a disserta- tion on the carnivalesque in black visual culture. In the summer, she goes upstate weekly to ride horses.

This year New York tightened its claim on her when she landed a spot in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s artist-in-residence program, a prestigious incubator of black talent, alongside residents Sable Elyse Smith and Tschabalala Self. But even as her star rises in the art world, Hamilton is deter- mined to invest in her soul base, the South, and buy her own land. “There’s just more space,” she said. “And in order for me to think about these issues, it’s important for me to be there, and in the community.”

Recently, she explored the legacy of the turpentine industry that dominated the Southeast well into the 20th century, in which workers in backwoods camps, isolated and kept in debt by company scrip, tapped the pine trees for resins. Her research took her to a ban doned camps in the forests of Florida and Georgia. “Pitch,” her first museum solo exhibition, currently at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, through March, is titled for the resinous substance that shipbuilders used to make vessels watertight.

She installed a de constructed pine forest in a gallery of the old mill complex, with 12-foot trunks, imposing and straight, set in twos and threes. The pine fragrance drifts through the gallery, along with the cho- ral track of a video installation in a small walk-in room. In it Hamilton, her face con- cealed by a beaked mask, rides a brown horse. Insects hover across swamp waters. An African-American congregation worships in a country church.

Hallie Ringle, the curator of contemporary art at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, and until recently assistant curator at the Stu d io Museum, said Hamilton’s practice reminded her of Chicagobased p ainter Kerry J ames Marshall. “Maybe it’s the richness of the composition, or the colors that she’s tapping into,” said Ringle, who selected Hamilton for “Fictions,” the Studio Museum’s showcase exhibition last year. It’s an intriguing connection: the Chicago painter and the rural-South mixed-media art- ist, yet both invested in the spirit material of AfricanAmerican life. “Her installations are super smart,” Ringle said. “They’re really layered, and they unfold almost as paintings.”

In “Fictions,” Hamilton showed “Foresta,” a walk- in installation that paired her signature objects — the masks, the tax ider my forms — with shimmering footage of swamp waters. The instal lation in “Pitch” is both similar and different. “I repeat some footage,” she said. “I figure if you can have motifs that repeat in drawings or painting or objects, why can’t video have that too? I like having a marker.”

On a recent afternoon, Hamilton’s studio in the Stu- dio Museum’s temporary work space in Harlem, where it has taken up quarters dur- ing construction of its new building, was tidily arrayed with her tools.

The artist, who favors a vintage-casual look, from jeans and boots to fitted jackets and frills, fabricates the costumes that her portraiture subjects wear as she art- directs them in the woods. Next to the sewing machine in the studio were confections-in-progress like a fur collar mounted with cloth roses. With her Mass MoCA exhibition up — as well as an outdoor sculpture at Storm King, part of a collective show on climate change — she is back in research mode, starting the process toward her residency exhibition in the spring.

On her mind are hurricanes. Hamilton watched from afar as Hurricane Michael walloped the north Florida coast and her home city. “Every hurricane season you feel more helpless being away,” she said. Her attunement to the sting of these storms is partly a rural inheritance: “My grandmother can tell you everythin g about climate change,” she said. But now her research takes her into the history of hurricanes — from the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 to this year’s Florence and Michael — and their impact on black communities.

She knows that after the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928, which appears in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” at least 1,600 black migrant laborers were buried in mass graves — archaeologists suspect many more. Katrina, a shaping event for society and politics today, had precedents. “My concern is which communities are more vulnerable,” Hamilton said. “Which ones are given the least care, which ones are always on the wrong side of the levee; and how that relates to the history of power, and of the country.”